A number of pressing problems confront the healthcare industry. As of June 2012 there were 114,636 patients registered by United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) as needing an organ transplant. According to UNOS, between January and March 2012 only 6,838 transplants were performed. Each year more patients are added to the UNOS list than transplants are performed, resulting in a net increase in the number of patients waiting for a transplant.
Additionally, the research and development cost of a new pharmaceutical compound is approximately $1.8 billion. See Paul, et al. (2010). How to improve R&D productivity: the pharmaceutical industry's grand challenge. Nature Reviews Drug Discovery 9(3):203-214. Drug discovery is the process by which drugs are discovered and/or designed. The process of drug discovery generally involves at least the steps of: identification of candidates, synthesis, characterization, screening, and assays for therapeutic efficacy. Despite advances in technology and understanding of biological systems, drug discovery is still a lengthy, expensive, and inefficient process with low rate of new therapeutic discovery.